Chinatown Group’s Efforts Pay Off in Police Substation : LAPD: Safety association’s campaign led to the opening of an office in 1992. Now, with merchants’ seed money, it will become a full-service, 24-hour facility in the vanguard of community-based policing.

Prompted by all too frequent robberies, muggings and extortion by local gangs, half a dozen Chinatown residents got together in the late 1970s to demand more police protection.

They later formed the Chinatown Public Safety Assn., and since 1983 have been raising money and meeting with public officials and police to accomplish their goal.

“I remember [when] every other guy you knew was robbed or mugged,” said Saykin Foo, one of the group’s founders. “We wanted to see what we could do to get the LAPD to help these people.”

Three years ago, the Chinatown group opened a police drop-in center on busy North Hill Street, where a single officer takes complaints from community members in a building initially funded by the association.

That was just a beginning. Now, the Chinatown Public Safety Assn.’s efforts may point the way to a new citywide approach to community-based policing.

By November, LAPD officials hope, the Hill Street police building will become a kind of laboratory. Instead of a drop-in center staffed by a lone officer, the building will become a full-service mini-police station, a branch of the LAPD’s Central Division.

Lt. Sue Rendulich took charge of the fledgling Chinatown substation Monday. The station, scheduled to be open seven days a week around the clock, will be staffed by up to 50 officers, who not only will respond to citizens’ calls, but also book and detain suspects and interview witnesses.

“This puts teeth into the talk about community policing,” said Capt. Richard Bonneau, who is spearheading the effort in the Central Division. “And we will be giving local officers the ability to come up with solutions [to problems] that are particular to their area.”

It is part of a Los Angeles Police Department plan to bring officers closer to the communities they serve. All of the city’s 18 police divisions are looking at decentralizing into smaller districts, such as in Chinatown.

Two Chinatown merchants put up $160,000 in seed money for the Hill Street building where the substation will be located. Last year the Chinatown Public Safety Assn. raised more than $75,000, said Fay King Gee, its chair.

Members of the group said the new police presence in Chinatown was long overdue. “We are taxed to death,” said Foo, who is a certified public accountant. “The city gets all of our money and what do they give us? Nothing, no protection.”

Now, however, he feels gratified by the new station. “It’s a community effort that we foresaw,” Foo said. “We wanted community-based policing 14 years ago.”

Some Chinatown merchants and residents are still wary of reporting crimes to the police, a fact the new station may help change.

A shop owner on Alpine Street said he had recently been visited by a man demanding $60 in extortion money. The shop owner paid the money and did not report the crime.

“I just gave him the money and told him to leave me alone,” said the man, who refused to give his name and spoke in Cantonese.

A restaurant owner on the same block denied ever having problems with crime but added that sometimes gang members come to her restaurant, eat a full meal and leave without paying the bill.

“It’s no big deal,” she said, waving her hand in the air as if shooing away a pest. “It is only $5 or $6 anyway.”